It is the job that has proved a surefire hit – more than 10,000 people have applied to be a HUMAN PAINTBALL TARGET.

Bosses of UK Paintball, which has sites in Coventry, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Redditch, Nottingham and Stoke, placed a bizarre sits vacant ad for someone to have paintballs shot at them to test their impact.

The job title is ‘Human Bullet Impact Tester’, and the successful applicant will have to stand on the spot while paintballs are fired at them at high speed.

They won’t have any protective gear and, in some of the more extreme tests, may even have to strip down to ‘limited’ clothing.

The human target job – needed so that the company can carry out health and safety checks on its paintball bullets – is touted as ‘ideal’ for students or young adults trying to save some cash.

With flexible working hours – around one to two hours a day – and a pro-rata salary of £40,000, it certainly has its attractions for the target audience.

But even UK Paintball founder Justin Toohig has been overwhelmed by the scale of the response.

Expressions of interest for the job have flooded in from as far away as India, the United States, Canada and Croatia.

Comments in the applications include:

“I’m a rugby player and I used to play airsoft without protection so I know physical pain.”

One candidate said: “I can break watermelon with my head.”

Another admitted “I always dreamed of being face-covered by paint while screaming, so I think I can be the perfect tester.”

One unlikely candidate said he was fat – so was easier to aim at.

Toohig, owner of UKPaintball.co.uk, said: “This incredible response is the last thing we expected when we posted the advert.

“We couldn’t have predicted that so many people in the UK and beyond would want to get shot for a living.

“Among the applicants so far has been an ex-Army soldier boasting previous experience of guns and weaponry.

“We’ve heard from a paintballing enthusiast who has indulged in his hobby all around the world, and from a former magician’s assistant who was once almost shot for real in an illusion that went horribly wrong.

“It’s going to be a real struggle attempting to whittle down the thousands of applicants to just one.

“We have been so incredibly inundated with amazing candidates wanting the job that we are now considering an X Factor-style boot camp for the a final 10, to see just who can handle being shot for a living.

“Whilst the recruitment of this role may seem somewhat unusual, it is important for our health and safety checks that before any new batches of paintballs are given to paying customers, we check for faults and monitor the damage they can do to the body.”